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SPEAKERS for the 17th Annual GIVE THANKS FOR SCRUM event (2025)

Rita McGrath, one of the world’s top experts on strategy and innovation, is consistently ranked among the top 10 management thinkers in the world by the prestigious Thinkers50 and won their #1 award in strategy. She is a trusted partner and strategic advisor in the C-suites of many of the country’s biggest and most well-known companies – especially as they work to grow, evolve, reinvent themselves and see around corners. 

She is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on strategic inflection points, the topic of her most recent book -  Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). She is the author of 4 other books on leadership, business and organizational management including the best-selling The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). Her work on discovery-driven growth was praised by the late legendary management thinker Clayton Christensen as offering “some of the most important ideas of management and strategy that have ever been developed.” She is currently working on a book full of humor and insight for business leaders aimed at helping organizations become ‘2% less stupid’ by adopting permissionless structures. 

Rita regularly sits down for in-depth conversations with high level authors and leaders in business for her popular podcastThought Sparks. She also writes a regular Thought Sparks newsletter and shares insights across social media platforms, including LinkedIn, where she has more than 45,000 followers.  

JEFF SUTHERLAND

Dr. Jeff Sutherland is an individual that needs no introduction, but let’s take a shot at it.  Jeff is a former US Air Force “Top Gun” and the co-creator of the Scrum framework. This model, developed in 1993 and formalized in 1995 with Ken Schwaber, has since been adopted by the vast majority of software development companies around the world.  Jeff is a leading expert on how the framework has evolved to meet the needs of today’s business. Realizing its benefits are not limited to software development, he has adapted this strategy to several other industries including finance, healthcare, education and telecom.  Scrum and Scrum@Scale are now widely adopted and create hyper-productive development teams.  As founder and Chairman of Scrum Inc., creator of Scrum@Scale, Senior Advisor and Agile Coach to OpenView Venture Partners, Jeff trains executives and shares agile best practices with organizations around the globe.

DAVID WEST

DAVE WEST is the CEO of Scrum.org. He is a frequent keynote speaker and is a widely published author of articles. He also is the co-author of two books, The Nexus Framework For Scaling Scrum and Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and then worked with Ivar Jacobson running the North American business for IJI. Then managed the software delivery practice at Forrester research where he was VP and research director. Prior to joining Scrum.org he was Chief Product Officer at Tasktop where he was responsible for product management, engineering and architecture.

DANIEL MEZICK